THE BAUHAUS
WEIMAR DESSAU BERLIN CHICAGO
Hans Wingler
Hans Wingler: THE BAUHAUS: WEIMAR DESSAU BERLIN CHICAGO. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1969. First English-language edition. Folio. Cream cloth titled in black. Black endpapers. Publishers slipcase. 653 pp. Illustrated with 24 color plates and over 1,000 black and white images. Spine cloth lightly sunned. Slipcase with mild [yet typical] edgewear and a few scratches and white paint flecks. The book looks and feels unread. Interior unmarked and very clean. Inexplicably out-of-print. A extremely nice copy of this oversized, essential reference volume: a nearly fine copy in a very good or better example of the Publishers slipcase.
10.5 x 14.5 hardcover book with 653 pages and over 1,000 black and white images and 24 color plates. Translated by Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert. Includes a roster of all students during the years 1919-1932 and bibliography listing all associated programs, statutes and publications by and about the movement, and work by all the Bauhaus faculty including Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, Josef Albers, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, Hannes Meyer, Mies van der Rohe and others.
This book is THE definitive Bauhaus volume. Highly recommended.
The standard work on the subject offering a one-stop sourcebook and the most comprehensive collection of documents and pictorial material on this famous school of design. Originally published in German in 1962 under the name "Das Bauhaus" by Verlag Ger. Rasch & Co.: The second edition, revised was published in 1969. This English-language edition was adapted from the German text and includes extensive supplementary material. Wingler traces the Bauhuas pre-history, the Weimar years, the transfer to Dessau, Gropius's Dessau years, Meyer's Dessau years, Mies van der Rohe's Dessau years, the Berlin years, and the New Bauhaus at Chicago 1937-38.
Includes references to all aspects of the Bauhuas, including: Itten's Preliminary Course, Klee's Course, Kandinsky's Course, Color Experiments, Carpentry Workshop, Stained Glass Workshop, Pottery Workshop, Metal Workshop, Weaving Workshop, Stage Workshop, Wall Painting Workshop, Display Design, Architecture, Typography and Layout; the Bauhaus Press, the Weimar Exhibition, 1923, Moholy-Nagy's Preliminary Course, Albers' Preliminary Course, Bauhaus Building, The Masters' Houses, Other Buildings in Dessau, Architecture Department, Weaving Workshop, Typography Workshop: Printing, layout, posters, Photography, Exhibition Technique, Wall Painting Workshop: Wall paper, Sculpture Workshop, Stage Workshop, Extracurricular Activities, Spread of the Bauhaus Idea, Bauhaus Teaching in the United States and much more.
The “totalizing” approach to design that Muriel Cooper brought to the MIT Press (in which nothing escaped the design mission, and advertising, brochures, and letterhead received attention alongside the books that the Press published) already bore the legacy of the Bauhaus, which had made such an approach its guiding philosophy several decades earlier. But the modernism that the school embodied can be seen in kernel form in Cooper’s colophon: an embracement of the aesthetics and approach that mass production had introduced to the twentieth century, as well as a rejection of the emotional expressionism endemic to the German Expressionists that had immediately preceded the Bauhaus. It is thus completely fitting that the MIT Press book that not only officially made The MIT Press forever known as a “design press,” but remains one of Cooper’s biggest legacies in book design, is the 1969 publication of the English adaptation of Hans Wingler’s Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (later released in a paperback edition in 1978).
While the stature (and physical size) of this book tends to overshadow other MIT Press books that had been overseen by her, a number of which deserve more attention than they currently receive (the award-winning 1965 study of highways, The View from the Road by Donald Appleyard, Kevin Kynch, and John R. Myer for example), the amount of work that went into Bauhaus was enormous, and Cooper and the rest of the MIT Press devoted years of in-house preparation to seeing the book into print.
Here are excerpts from Muriel Cooper’s 1994 AIGA MEDAL citation by Janet Abrams: “It would be easy to see Muriel Cooper's (American, 1925 – 1994) career as having been divided into two parts: the conventional print-based graphic designer, followed by the computer graphics cartographer. Certainly, by the time she took up the computer at age fifty-two, Cooper had established a distinguished reputation as a print designer. Among many awards, she received the second AIGA Design Leadership Award for design excellence at MIT, where she worked from 1952 to 1958 and then from 1966 to 1994. There she founded the MIT Office of Publications (now Design Services), and was the first Design and Media Director of the MIT Press logo—an abstract play on the vertical strokes of the initial letters—in 1963, while running her own design studio.
“But rather than a change of course, Cooper's shift toward computers can be seen as the continuing pursuit, via new technology, of an abiding interest: the relationship of dynamic to static media. She was, as she recalled, "always trying to push some more spatial and dynamic issues into a recalcitrant medium," namely print. Having designed the epic Bauhaus book for the MIT Press (published in 1969), she later made a film version that attempted a visual speed-reading of the material to escape the sluggishness of the printed page. And in recent work at the VLW, she was beginning to grapple with the converse: how to translate an interactive experience with a computer onto paper, "without just dumping"—an area known technically as "transcoding." In other words: how to turn time into space.
“Cooper's first encounter with computer programming was a summer course run by Negroponte around 1967, while she was a conventional print designer at the MIT Office of Publications. It was not a promising start. "I nearly died," Cooper said. "We were in this big room with these teletype machines doing Fortran and there was nothing visual about anything. You had to translate any idea you had into this highly codified symbolic language that didn't make any goddamned sense to me, and I was crazy." However frustrating and bewildering that course, Cooper came out of it with "a conviction, naïve as it could be, that there lay in computers the possibility of a huge amount of flexibility that the publishing procedure did not have. It was very clear to me that there was a huge potential."
“What Cooper brought to the Media Lab was a background not only as a practicing designer, but also as an art school teacher. The atmosphere of an atelier permeates the VLW; its open-plan physical layout (and hence, social organization) was related to Cooper's idiosyncratic teaching style, as Small recounts. "She was a different kind of teacher: very reluctant to tell you what to do. Once you've started with the assumption that there's no right or wrong way of doing anything, what becomes more important is getting student to think on their own. Muriel set up the right kind of environment for that: the space encourages interaction. Even naming it a workshop, not a lab, was important."
“Cooper appreciated the skills of designers and programmers in equal measure, and nurtured a cadre of people possessing both. "My model is very much more an art school, or a design school, where you don't give recipes for things," she said. "But it's not purely a studio, because there's a lot of rigor in making a machine do something you want it to do. The electronic environment seems to me to have significantly different characteristics than any medium we've communicated in before."
“Driving to her house, to fetch tapes she had forgotten to bring in for a colleague, Cooper talked about several epiphanies that changed the direction of her career. There was the spring-cleaning when she went through a closetful of carefully saved pieces of graphics, and realized that she didn't care about any one of them "because they didn't have much content." That propelled her move from graphic design into editorial design, but in time, she grew frustrated by book design as well. "Too often, the role of the designer is to clothe a set of messages they've had no participation in. Here is a book. You didn't write it. You don't change it except insofar as you present the information somebody else has generated. You're not really collaborating, either, because the stuff is here, and accomplished fact. I decided I had to wash that out of my head and impose my own problems."
“After several years gestating a text, authors tend to have their own view of what their book should look like, which can lead to some interesting battles of wits. "I had that experience in spades with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi," Cooper recalled, speaking of the original edition of Learning From Las Vegas, published by MIT Press in 1972. Cooper even proposed a bubble-wrap cover, in homage to Las Vegas's glitz—a suggestion the authors firmly rejected. "What they wanted most was a Duck, not a Decorated Shed. I gave them a Duck," Cooper went on, referring to the dichotomy between two types of symbolic architecture posited in the book, the former being a literal representation of its function. "I thought: 'Boy, this is wonderful material. I'm not gonna let them screw it.' Hah! You should have seen it! Well, they hated it! I loved it."
“I wondered whether Cooper had writing ambitions of her own. "Yes, I would like to write a book. I always use Gyorgy Kepes's The Language of Vision as a model." What would it take for her to write the book? Without missing a beat, she answered with another question: "A brain transplant?"